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Automatically set unique permissions in SharePoint with Microsoft Flow

April 24, 2019 8:15 am

We have a customer who is using SharePoint Online and they recently asked us to find a solution for the following situation in the Documents library.

There are a couple of root-level folders which are shared with specific user groups using a special permission level which doesn’t allow the users to delete those parent folders. However, the customer needs to allow the users to create new sub-folders and also delete them. The problem is that the sub-folders automatically inherit the permission settings of their parent folder which doesn’t allow the delete operation. So, they need to automatically break the inheritance and set appropriate permissions for the new sub-folders.

We found that Microsoft Flow is a great tool which helped us to resolve this problem by automating the process of breaking the default permissions inheritance and setting the desired permissions in SharePoint.

In this particular request we need to programmatically break inheritance of permissions for a given file/folder. Also, we need to assign unique permissions for that file/folder. These operations could be performed programmatically by calling the SharePoint REST API. This is a secured API and all API calls should be authenticated and authorized. This authentication is based on access tokens.

We ran into some peculiarities while implementing the solution and that is why we decided to share our experience here.